Tumblr’s Fashion Week drama continues

As of yesterday and the start of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York, the vast majority of fashion-following eyes have been trained on the runways (and, for those not present, the online live streams of the shows, of course). But a behind-the-scenes drama with Tumblr fashion bloggers at its center has in recent days drawn the kind of gasps usually reserved for models who literally take a tumble on the runway.

Tumblr New York Fashion Week blog page

At issue is the blogging company’s attempt, via Tumblr’s Fashion Director Rick Tong, to charge major fashion brands between $10K and $350K, according to reports, for various New York Fashion Week sponsorship packages ranging, on the low end, for access to an event attended by a group of fashion bloggers to advertising on the official Tumblr New York Fashion Week page. (If you’re interested in the details of the various sponsorship levels that Tumblr apparently offered brands, you can see a list here).

So why all the fuss? As Mashable reported, it has a lot to do with Tumblr’s apparent lack of analytics offerings for advertisers and the comparatively high rates it was hoping to charge. And then there’s the idea of charging fashion brands for access to bloggers, who may or may not be compensated for their time and content, and could just as easily be reached out to directly. But beyond that, there are the more complicated ideas of asking companies to pay for media coverage, whether bloggers are, in fact, legitimate members of the media and where the actual lines are in all this gray matter.

Notably, no major brands appear to be advertising on either the Tumblr NYFW or the Tumblr Fashion, so it seems that the would-be campaign fizzled out quickly after a slew of fashion industry folks cried foul over the situation.

And while the conversation may have died down online as New York Fashion Week’s actual fashion shows take over, the dust-up was discussed more than once on stage at the Independent Fashion Blogger Conference, held on Wednesday in New York, and has been talked about pretty much everywhere that’s in any way interested in fashion or technology. Last but not least, Tumblr’s Tong didn’t do much to keep a low profile in the blogosphere today, thanks to an already-ridiculed typo on his own blog: the misspelling of Nina Garcia’s name in a headline highlighting Marie Claire magazine’s new Tumblr blog.

Typos, of course, can be easily fixed. But Tumblr’s reputation among fashion industry insiders? Perhaps not as easy.